1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to optimizing resources in a telecommunications system, and more specifically to a system and a method for optimizing resources of a packet service gateway.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS), a General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a packet-based radio communication service, which became available in 2000. The GPRS is known in the art and the specification of the GPRS is provided by 3GPP available at www.3gpp.org, last visited Jan. 3, 2006. The GPRS guarantees mobile devices such as mobile phones and laptops access to the Internet without interruption, at a fast speed. Because of fast data transmission by the GPRS system, users may take part in video conferences, and use a mobile device to perform interactive communication with multimedia web sites. Packets transmitted by a mobile device are provided to the public network through Gateway GPRS Support Nodes (GGSN). The GGSN functions as a gateway that routes packets between the GPRS and the public network.
As depicted in FIG. 1, the UMTS includes mobile devices 100a, 100b, . . . , 100n and a base station controller (BSC) 101. The mobile devices 100a, 100b, . . . , 100n communicate with the BSC 101 in a GSM system, for example. In a GPRS system, the BSC 101 is connected to a packet control unit (PCU). Alternatively, the PCU of the GPRS system may be included in the BSC 101. The PCU is adjacent to the public network and operates a routing protocol and performs a security function such as a firewall. Other base stations operating in non GPRS system may include a Radio Access Node (RAN) that is used for authentication of packets. For example, the UMTS system has a RAN serving as a base station controller 101.
The BSC 101 is in turn connected to a serving GPRS supporting node (SGSN) 102. The SGSN 102 keeps track of the location of an individual mobile devices 100a, 100b, . . . , 100n and performs security functions and access control. The SGSN 102 also exists to connect the BSC 101 to the GPRS system 103 (depicted as GPRS backbone 103 in FIG. 1), which in turn is connected to the gateway GPRS support node (GGSN) 104. As explained above, the GGSN 104 is a gateway between the GPRS/UMTS network and the public data network (PDN) 105 such as the internet.
In order for the mobile devices 100 to have access to the PDN 105, a connection with the GPRS 103 and the mobile devices 100 are established. Due to the call setup time, an “always on” connection is established for the GPRS/UMTS networks. That is, once the connection is established, it remains “on” even when the MS 100 is not communicating with the public data network until it is disconnected by the MS 100. With these types of connections, the mobile operators that provide the services to the mobile devices are faced with a large amount of equipment that will potentially be deployed if the mobile device maintains the “always on” connection.